A modest proposal: Advertise a utilization ratio

You know what sucks?  US Broadband.  More specifically, caps seem to be getting more and more popular.

Now I have nothing against caps, in theory.  Charging by usage works fine for electricity and water.  The problem is:

• Growth.  Data is one of those resources that you keep using more of.  GMail has solved this problem– it keeps giving you more space every day.  When are the caps renegotiated?  Maybe never.
• Cost.  Data is often sold at profit margins of 1000%+.  I understand you need to make some money–just keep it realistic, k?

I have a modest proposal to solve this problem.  Alongside every advertisement of “up to” 10Mbps (which is a whole other post in itself), require advertisement of the percentage of time you can actually max out this connection.  For instance, if you have a 100GB monthly cap, you could actually sustain your 10Mbps for 8000 seconds before hitting the cap.  There are 2,592,000 seconds in a month, so your advertized utilization for this service (the amount of time you can actually use the advertised speeds) is 3/10ths of 1 percent, a.k.a. .3%.  That will strike fear into the heart of a consumer.  That will force them to start competing on caps.

Actual stats from real ISPs:

Cox Premier – “up to” 20Mbit, 3.8% utilization

AT&T 3G: “up to” 7.2Mbit, 0.08% utilization

Longview Cable: “up to” 10Mbit, 1.1% utilization

Letourneau University: (a little hard to calculate) 5Mbit measured speed, 1.1% utilization

HughesNet: “up to” 5Mbit, 0.09% utilization

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